Zohran Mamdani, the AOC-endorsed socialist running to be New York City’s mayor, has gotten a lot of attention for his radical anti-Israel views, but his economic ideas are just as nutty.

In addition to proposing freezing the rent in stabilized apartments, creating city-run grocery stores, and providing free child care, he is calling for making all busses free. For those naysayers, Mamdani produced a video, taunting critics: “When someone tells you buses could never be free, ask them how much they pay to take the Staten Island Ferry.”

It’s true that the ferry offers free transportation between Staten Island and lower Manhattan, but that has absolutely zero relevance to the operation of the city’s bus system.

The ferry became free in 1997. While this coincided with Rudy Giuliani’s reelection campaign, it also came at a time when the city was transitioning from the old token-based system to one based on MetroCards, which among other things, ushered in a new era allowing travelers to transfer between buses and subways, and vice versa, without having to pay two separate fares (as had previously been the case). Because the ferry goes from one part of Staten Island to one part of Manhattan, most people who ride the ferry are doing so in tandem with another form of transportation. So this was seen as a way to equalize the new policy across boroughs and essentially treat the ferry as a free transfer. To put another way, the Staten Island Ferry is free in the sense that New Yorkers get free bus rides when they transfer from the subway or another bus. While there are tourists who are beneficiaries of these free ferry rides, there were also costs associated with collecting fares, such as upgrading the turnstiles to accept payment by MetroCard and then maintenance of the turnstiles. So ultimately, the juice wasn’t worse the squeeze.

But beyond that, bus travel is a different beast entirely due to the much larger scale. There is one ferry route and hundreds of bus routes; there are nine vessels in the ferry fleet and 5,800 busses; just under 1.5 million passengers rode the ferry in May, but busses transported more than that last Tuesday alone.

The city’s MTA, which operates buses and subways, is already expected to face annual budget deficits of $3 billion — and that’s with the current fares. Those numbers would look significantly worse under the ridiculous Mamdani proposal.